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the current carried the snag and other drift against the hull, and with a sudden low pop the ash stake in the clay sprang up several feet and fell to the wet bank.

      Sibley would certainly have heard the sound if he had been awake, but, being asleep, he merely changed in his dreams from trying to catch swimming rabbits by the ears to trying to shoot them with an absurd putty-blower, which he heard pop while the soft missiles merely made the rabbits turn and laugh at him.

      Pushed by the oak log and the drift in the branches of the snag, the shanty-boat moved down the creek and out into the swift current of the Mississippi, not stopping at all in the little swirling eddies a few yards off shore. The snag was caught in the longshore eddy, and lodged there against several trees, with one long branch caught in a barbed-wire fence fifteen or twenty feet underwater at that point.

      The shanty-boat whirled away from shore and out into midstream. There it became part of the miscellaneous collection of débris, drift, flotsam, and articles which a flood tide, forty feet higher than low-water mark, seizes in coming down the upper Mississippi.

      Sibley slept as the boat drifted out into mid-Mississippi, in a vast torrent which was in places five or ten miles wide.

      It was late in the afternoon; the rain was falling with a purring, splashing sound on the cabin roof; no other noise was audible, except that away off yonder, at intervals, there was the gurgling swishing of acres of drift coming together in a "squeeze," as a river whirl threw the masses of material into other acres of river loot.

      The boat amid the scattering drift raced down-stream, the submerged bottom-lands on each side showing woods where the water hid the lower branches of the trees, while the foot of high cliffs in the distance were dimly seen through the rain. Out on the bottoms there were houses with water up to the second-story windows. On the roof of one of the houses a flock of chickens sat huddled together along the ridge-pole. A dog, sitting on a tree branch to which he had made his way, howled; but he was a long way off from Sibley and the howl but added another phase to the boy’s dreams.

      It was the most dismal thing imaginable—that vast flood, with the rain spattering down on the surface and blackening the wet drift. The gloomy day ended, shade by shade, the distant woods blended into a dark mass and the far-off hills faded from sight.

      Darkness fell upon the water, and the night was less gloomy than the dull and colorless day had been. It was a tremendous thing to fall so softly—that night! It was as silent as the passing of a whiff of fog. Its effect upon the terrible desolation of the flood was to make it seem almost friendly and pleasant.

      Sibley, having made up for his loss of sleep on the previous night, stirred uneasily on his cot. He sat up and stretched, opening his eyes. Then he uttered an exclamation.

      "Night, and the folks aren’t home yet!" he said. "I’ll bet they’ve gone to the movies—and they didn’t ask me to go along! Wish they’d come home. I’m hungry!"

      He put his feet into his slippers, and felt in his pockets for his match-box, consisting of a ten-gage and a twelve-gage brass shell pushed together. He struck a match on the bottom of his slipper, and lighted the big brass lamp on the table.

      "I’m hungry!" he repeated. "Wish they’d come home; I want something to eat. It’s after seven o’clock. If they hadn’t had supper up town, they’d be home by this time. I’m going to have something; I can’t wait any longer!"

      Thus communing with himself, he went to the cupboard, and opened it for inspection. There was plenty to eat there—bread and butter, cold biscuit, cold fried ham, and other good things.

      "My!" he thought. "It’s nice to be safe and sound and dry in a little eddy where nothing can happen! I’d hate to be caught out on Old Mississip a night like this! Lots do get caught, though, ’count of their not tying in good, or not finding a good landing-eddy. It’s just as still right here, just as safe, as on the top of the highest bluff in the world!"

      He ate most of a rabbit leg, then he had a piece of cheese, and a dried-apple turnover.

      "Oh, I guess I’ll wait for them to come home!" he said at last. "I don’t feel very hungry, after all. I’ll just eat some cookies and wait."

      He went to the bow cabin, took up a book, and began to read. The book was a large one, and not very amusing to judge from the title:

      Report of the

      Chief of Engineers

      U. S. Army

       1916

       In Three Parts

       Part III

      To Sibley, however, it was absorbing; for he loved everything about the river. On page 3418 he found the statement:

      Storms over the drainage basins of the White and Arkansas rivers during the last 10 days of January, 1916, had in the meantime produced record floods in both rivers. Gauges at the lower end of the White River and Upper Yazoo Basins accordingly exceeded by from 6 inches to 1 foot the stages attained in the flood of 1913.

      Emergency measures were initiated about February 1, when a serious flood was recognized as being inevitable. Conditions quickly developed to a critical point in the Upper St. Francis Basin in the Vicinity of Moore’s Landing, Marshall’s Sewer, Big Lake, and Birds Point, and in the lower end of the White River district from about mile 28 south.

      And so on. It was part of the Appendix, containing the Mississippi River Commission Report, and when one is on the great river it is interesting to read the government reports upon it which one gets as Mr. Carruth had gotten this, by going to the office of the River Commission in St. Louis, or to one’s Congressman.

      "I believe they will have a regular old report about this flood!" Sibley thought. "My! It must be interesting working for the Government, and seeing one of these floods all down the river and all over, in the government boats, and helping the people in the overflow! I wish—"

      He turned his eyes to the base of the big lamp, and dreamed of one day being a government worker on the river. He wondered how he would feel if he were the secretary of the commission, and could send a report with a thousands pages in it to the Government—to Congress!

      "It’s almost time those folks of mine were home!" he thought, but when he looked at the clock he found it was only a little after eight.

      He went over to the corner of the cabin and picked up his rifle, looked through the barrel, and saw that it needed cleaning.

      "They’ve gone to the movies, sure enough!" he grumbled after he had cleaned it. "They wanted me to go to bed early to-night. How still it is!"

      It had stopped raining. He could not hear a sound of any kind. There wasn’t even the splash of a wave against the side of the boat. Then, away off yonder, he heard something; it was one of those dreadful river drift squeezes, in which a hundred acres of all kinds of things—from a floating house to a floating straw-stack; from a wire fence to an old drift pile; from a dead fallen tree to sawlogs and squared bridge timbers and lumber piles—twist themselves together in a writhing mass, each thing trying to be in the place wanted by something else at the same time.

      "It’s stopped raining, anyhow," he reflected. "If it clears up, perhaps the river will go down next month, and the bottoms—Whew! they’ll be muddy after this soaking! What’s that!”

      A shudder ran through the boat, as of some thing dragging alongside. He stepped calmly out upon the stern deck, and closed the door behind him, that the light inside might not blind him.

      He looked about, blinking. At first he could see nothing in the black darkness. Then he saw water, faintly luminous amid black masses lying low on the surface. He looked up quickly. There ought to have been trees against the gray sky, but there were none.

      Miles away he saw a faint yellow light; no walls of clay sheltered the boat from the wind and there was no little bay! Gasping with astonishment, he climbed the six-round fixed ladder to the cabin roof and, standing there, looked around the horizon.

      He

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